The IRS plans to audit the wealthiest corporate, partnership, and individual taxpayers to achieve some of its main objectives in 2022.
In his recent testimony before Congress, IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig identified the allocation of additional resources to enhance the IRS’s data analytics tools, including:
Enforcement: $340 million for continuing to establish enforcement strategies that will ensure a fair tax system, by allowing the IRS to eventually double its compliance efforts on partnerships and high-wealth returns and devote more resources to examining large corporations with balance sheet assets greater than $10 million. Other initiatives supported by this investment include the Cross-Border and Treaty and Transfer Pricing Operations; expansion of oversight efforts against cybercrime; increased use of applied data analytics in enforcement activities; and enhancing taxpayer confidence in the tax-exempt sector.
The IRS receives massive amounts of data through tax returns, informational returns, sister agencies, foreign governments, leaks, and non-state third parties. The more perfect the algorithms they use to sift through this data, the higher the likelihood they will be able to target tax avoidance, both criminal and civil. The IRS is actively looking at AI techniques, such as machine learning, to further refine its data analysis.
This post is a part of a series on trends in the artificial intelligence space for 2022, authored by MoFo lawyers.